TLN on the Road in Peru

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After twelve days in Peru, my head is jam-packed with stories about ancient wars, grotesque rituals, powerful leaders, and wondrous monuments. Many of these stories were provided by guides at the various sites I explored in the center of the country: Lima, the Sacred Valley, and (of course) Machu Picchu.

The Inca were the great rulers of Peru, and their empire extended into the territory of neighboring countries such as Ecuador and Argentina. Though the empire reached its height under emperor Pachactui in the 15th century, it soon fell to the Spanish conquistadors.

Among the stories I can’t forget is the tale of Ollantay, best friend of Pachacuti. When Pachacuti refused to allow his sister to marry Ollantay, the jilted warrior abducted her and fled to the fortress-city Ollantaytambo, where he launched a war against his best friend for control of the empire. He failed, but was allowed to keep his life due to the fact that the princess was already with child.

Olantyatambo today.

Ollantaytambo today.

Nor can I forget one tour guide’s story of how the Inca hid Machu Picchu from the Spanish conquistadors. Although their empire was fragmented, at war with both itself and the Spanish, the major Inca factions were able to agree that Machu Picchu could not fall into Spanish hands. Using the Spaniards’ lust for gold against them, the Inca led the conquistadors into a near-impassable valley where they became stuck for forty years, thus allowing the jungle enough time to completely cover their magnificent mountain city.

Machu Picchu today, late afternoon.

Machu Picchu today, late afternoon.

Even the eventual discovery of Machu Picchu has its own colorful story.

American archeologist Hiram Bingham—the man who inspired the character of Indiana Jones, as a matter of fact—had been searching for the lost Inca city for years. On the last day of his expedition, almost totally out of money, Bingham arrived in a small farming community where he believed several ancient Inca artifacts had originated. He was disappointed to find what he thought were just a few old Inca ruins—the outskirts, it later turned out, of Machu Picchu.

Hiram Bingham saw these old Inca huts and thought to himself, "Whatevs..."

Hiram Bingham saw these old Inca huts and thought to himself, “Whatevs…”

With the sunlight fading, a dejected Bingham turned around to go home. It was then a young child, Pablito, came running out of the jungle imploring Bingham to wait. He told Bingham that he knew of some stupendous ruins nearby. Bingham followed reluctantly, but his disappointment soon transformed into awe when he beheld the remains of a temple complex overgrown with jungle. In the last of the sunlight, Bingham was able to take enough photographs of the temple to receive a massive grant from Yale University. He returned with an expedition the following year. (Also documented was Bingham’s egotistical attempt to destroy graffiti left by western explorers a few years before he arrived, evidence carved in stone proving that Bingham had not, in fact, discovered Machu Picchu. Scholars have since been able to find a number of references to Machu Picchu in earlier maps and surveys; it took Bingham’s association with Yale University and an archeology conference in Washington, D.C., to raise Machu Picchu to the world’s attention.)

The Temple of Three Windows, which Pablito showed to Hiram Bingham.

The Temple of Three Windows, which Pablito showed to Hiram Bingham.

Travel inspires me—if it’s not direct personal experience, it’s because the frequent history lessons remind me of the young culture I spring from here in the United States.

The greatest empires of the Americas—the Aztec, Maya, and the Inca—were born in Central and South America. Although the northern Native Americans did well, they didn’t leave wonders of the world behind like Machu Picchu and Chichen Itza.

Maybe it’s time to write a fantasy novel.

I’m certainly inspired to, given how vivid so much of the Inca history and lifestyle seems to me now…

“The Portable MFA in Creative Writing” is so Portable it´s Going in the Trash

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I can´t quite remember where I found out about The Portable MFA in Creative Writing, but I sort of wish I didn´t. At least I´m getting a blog post out of it, huh?

The book, written by a collective entity known as the New York Writers Project, pacakges itself as an alternative to a Master in Fine Arts (MFA) degree for creative writing. As a recent graduate of an MFA program myself, I was curious about how apparent “outsiders” might describe MFA programs, or perhaps market their school of thought to those interested in getting an MFA.

I found the book to be fairly dishonest about its subject matter, however.

It begins by setting up a false strawman, frightening the reader into thinking that an MFA program will put them into debt (the figure cited is $40,000 – $50,000) and then using that as the basis to provide the information that an MFA candidate would presumably learn in a program.

But while this might be the experience of Tim Tomlison, an MFA graduate of Columbia University and one of the principal writers of the book, there are plenty of solid MFA programs around the nation that won`t charge you a dime. Indeed, reading slightly (but only slightly) between the lines, it appears that Mr. Tomlison decided to shell out the exorbinant fees charged by Columbia, was psychically wounded by the MFA experience, and has decided to make this book into a sort of gotcha expose.

The truth is, if you´re a decent, committed, and/or lucky writer, it`s emminently possible to get admitted to an MFA program that waives your tuition. You don´t have to go into debt at all. Many times a university will pay you, in fact—putting you to work as academic slave labor, making you into a graduate teaching assistant or somesuch. This arrangement (which I benefited from) is a far cry from the debt strawman set up by the authors. There are even some MFA programs, such as the uber-prestigious Michener program at the University of Texas, Austin, that don´t even make you teach. They just pay you to write and take classes.

So the book fails at the outset by making itself seem invaluable, a $16.99 investment that will supposedly save the inexperienced writer $40,000 to $50,000 when in reality there are a number of programs that do not require tuition. Yes, you have to show promise to get in to these programs. But if you don´t know about these programs and find yourself nodding along with Mr. Tomlison as he challenges the point of the MFA, I would argue that you haven´t done your research into MFA programs in any depth.

My second complaint about the book is that it seems based on the notion (also a false premise) that absorbing raw information in the form of ”rules” is the path to success as a writer. The subtext of the book is that it´s transmitting a sort of secret knowledge which your $16.99 has purchased. This generally follows the “how to write” book model, which is mostly focused on explaining things like plot, character, setting, etc. But while I believe absorbing a number of rules will certainly help inexperienced writers, getting them from a book simply isn´t how most people learn.

Writing. Sailing. Painting. Math. It doesn´t matter what craft or skill we´re thinking about—the truth is that we learn visually, aurally, through touch; we learn at the bar during a conversation wtih fellow practicioners; we learn by hearing a master we admire being interviewed; we learn by doing. Think of the old salons, the old dinner clubs, the groups and fraternities in which famous writers talked and interacted. Think of the Paris modernists, and of Gertrude Stein telling Ernest Hemingway to cut out several paragraphs from his story ¨Big Two-Hearted River, 2¨ because they were shit.

These fully realized, interactive experiences are why people choose MFA programs. No book will give you the experience of a writer you admire, a professor, looking through your manuscript and putting his finger on the most embarassing sentence you´ve ever written. No book will replace a colleague who has read six or seven of your stories, understands your wavelength, and tries to offer suggestions that might strengthen your writing overall. No book, no matter how many times you read it, will replace personal interaction with others of similar interests. 

Perhaps this is more of a general critique I have against how-to-write books: the sense that simply absorbing raw information does not translate to skill accquisition. By drawing a specific comparision between MFA programs, however, the book sets itself up as being an apples-to-apples comparison. And it´s not.

In addition to the two issues above, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing fails to offer any particular structural model to understand fiction. Mr. Tomlinson simply plops down a number of sections that address the various aspects of stories without discussing how they are related or whether a first draft ought to pay more attention to one than another.

I´m not asking for something particularly deep here. But I am asking for something that other how-to-write books excel at, something more along the lines of what Jesse Kercheval writes in her decent how-to-write book, Building Fiction, when she says (I´m paraphrasing here) ¨Point of view is the most important choice a writer makes when writing a story.¨ Notably, the section on point of view appears late in Mr. Tomlinson´s article, as though it´s simply an afterthought.

You might criticize my aversion to this book from a social-psychological perspective, suggesting that I am trying to justify my own efforts and my own path as a newly minted Master of the Fine Arts. Perhaps there is some of that here; I don´t know. Perhaps the book would seem like a godsend to me if I had never done an MFA. But perhaps having a three-year MFA program under my belt (or in my pocket, or anywhere on my personage you would fancy) makes my perspective valuable.

Don´t read this book and think you are getting the equivalent of an MFA. You´re not.

You´re not even getting a quality how-to-write book.

***Note: This post was auto-programmed because I am currently exploring the lovely Andes Mountains in Peru. Comments will be approved and responded to when I return to civilzation in a few days.***

It’s Time to Think about Time

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“It must be remembered that structure is the residual deposit of duration.”

A friend of mine posted this quote by Roland Barthes on her Twitter feed recently, and it strikes me how true a statement this is. Writers who don’t pay attention to time and its passage are depriving themselves of a major storytelling tool, risking reader boredom at best and confusion at worst.

As I’ve complained before, many inexperienced writers—whether they realize they’re doing this or not—have a tendency to use a somewhat cinematic approach to storytelling, with tales that begin immediately in a scene and then plod forward, scene after scene, without much sense of emphasis or importance on particular moments.

In a film, this scene-after-scene motion is pretty much the only way to tell a story aside from the wiggle room you get from montage and voice-over narration. Contrast this with a literary work, in which realism of time and action matters to readers only to the extent they represent aesthetic choices designed to achieve particular literary effects.

By “duration,” I believe Barthes is referring to the procession of events and their relationship to each other. The “residual deposit” that is narrative structure flows from the ability to grab hold of this sense of duration, i.e., time’s passage.

Unfortunately, however, learning to manage time and its passage are not really discussed in writing workshops and classes. Time does not fit neatly into the “five elements of narrative” model (character, setting, language/tone/style, idea/theme, and plot/action) unless you want to consider time as a part of setting. And although “time” is linked to action (since actions occur in a time sequence), the only way to appreciate the importance of time in narrative is by using the E.M. Forster theory of plot as a series of causal actions which I discussed in a prior post.

We take the passage of time for granted in fiction writing and, in fact, many people manage it fairly naturally on their own just as a process of telling their stories. But if you’ve never spent much time thinking about time, it’s worth looking at some of your favorite writers and seeing how often they provide clauses and transitional phrases that help you track the duration of the story (and therefore, in accordance with the Barthes quote, provide the story with its structure).

By transitional phrases I mean:

“On the following evening….”

“One day…”

“One summer day…”

“After several weeks…”

“That morning…”

“In the middle of the night…”

“And then, on Sunday morning…”

Once your radar is tweaked to pick up on these time-markers and transitional phrases, I think you’ll be amazed at how useful they are in constructing narrative that goes beyond the scene-followed-by-scene approach.

In fact, learning to oscillate between scene and summary—as I mentioned in this post—is key to writing vivid, page-turning fiction that makes characters and their actions come to life for the reader.

I’m A Master Now…

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In case anyone was wondering, I’m officially a Master of the Fine Arts. Successfully defended my thesis, met all my credit requirements, and turned in my paperwork last week. Now it’s time to get out of academia and make some money in the real world again.

The defense wasn’t a love fest to be sure. At the back of my head, I suppose, there was a little voice hoping that my advisor and second reader would declare me brilliant, would say that my novel was ready for agents. That didn’t happen, of course, and I mostly knew that it wouldn’t. Still, it’s always a little disappointing to realize I still have a ways to go on a project before I can move on. I got some good critical feedback—the sort of things I suspected might be problematic but needed confirmation on from wiser, more objective heads; things I hadn’t even considered; and one or two points that, though interesting, I was inclined to disagree with.

This post is late by two days.

I’m already getting lazy, I suppose, but between getting ready to move to a new city and visiting Peru in May, I’ve got a lot on my mind.

A prior commenter asked whether I was going to start a new notebook or phase in my blog. I think I will but I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do yet. I’ve always wanted to explore a book called The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, so maybe I’ll do that. I’m still trying to finish my music project and I’m getting close—just two more songs.

Bear with me while I’m in transition, okay? One curious thing I’ve noticed, though, is that my blog seems to be getting the same amount of hits per day even though I’m only making weekly posts. I wonder what’s up with that?

Creative Nonfiction: Did You Get the Memo?

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Before I entered academia, I had little notion that something called creative nonfiction existed. But it does. And it’s awesome.

Often abbreviated as CNF, creative nonfiction is an up-and-coming subgenre that falls within the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) realm. CNF is, I believe, becoming a viable alternative to journalism in terms of equipping a budding writer with the tools necessary to write from life and experience.

With the popularity of self-publishing and an aging population, people will turn more to CNF as a way of telling their stories. The Internet, given that it encourages feature-style stories, photo essays, and multimedia presentations, offers CNF plenty of room to grow over the coming years.

“Creative Nonfiction?” someone might object, thinking themselves clever. “Isn’t that sort of an oxymoron?”

Possibly a bit. And CNF writers are among the first to say they aren’t happy with the branding of their chosen genre.

Yet folks who dismiss CNF simply on the basis of its name seem to be under the mistaken impression that it’s possible for an act of writing to be less than creative, as though it’s possible to write purely objective nonfiction. That’s a misperception. Even careful journalists cannot be purely objective.

While a creative nonfiction piece can be highly experimental—fragmented, lyrical, formally odd—it certainly doesn’t have to be. CNF encompasses the disciplines of science writing, travel writing, memoir, personal essay, and many other well-known forms of written expression.

Many popular authors such as Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm) and Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild) are writing and publishing CNF even though an audience of readers might not know that’s the name for what they’re reading. So too for authors on both independent and mainstream media web sites.

What appeals to me most about CNF is that it helps me write fiction. It helps me to know what ideas seem more like CNF ideas than fiction ideas, helps to prevent me from getting lazy and not using my imagination.

“This isn’t a fiction piece anymore,” I’ve told myself on more than one occasion. “This is more of a creative nonfiction piece. It has too much of myself in it.”

Knowing there’s a line, and that it’s possible to express myself through nonfiction as opposed to fiction, has helped me get a handle on some ideas that were getting too personal.

Conversely, familiarity with the form has given me a lot of ideas for CNF pieces that I hope to one day write—pieces that wouldn’t be appropriate as fiction but might be extremely interesting through the lens of nonfiction.

If you’re not familiar with CNF, check it out—you might be missing out on a major avenue of expression.

Tense and POV: Two HUGE Sources of Stability in Storytelling

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There’s an unspoken agreement between writers and readers, a contract if you will. Writers generally agree to uphold high standards of storytelling craft, to not throw any unwarranted curve-balls or take any cheap shots—in short, they agree not to disturb the illusion of the “vivid and continuous dream” described by novelist John Gardner.

But more importantly, readers agree to suspend their disbelief—to lay aside their cynicism and rationalism, to lower their shields and open their hearts. Readers know, if only subconsciously, that the writer is manipulating them. And yet they set this knowledge aside because they want to become immersed in other worlds and other lives.

To preserve the illusion of the vivid and continuous dream, readers need to sense the world of the story has an internal consistency. And writers need to know how to provide this consistency.

Although there are dozens of techniques and strategies writers use to create consistency, two of the most fundamental involve tense and point of view (also abbreviated POV).

Consistency in these two overarching features of narrative goes a long way toward convincing readers they have entered a real world, that the story they’re hearing is “true” to the extent any story can be.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the vast majority of the burden for fulfilling the writer-reader contract falls on the writer.

Though the reader often makes financial and time commitments, the writer has to do all the hard work—pretending, inventing, and pushing ideas forward while still operating within certain constraints. It’s hard work. And while some people seem to have a gift for absorbing the rules, others have to learn them. I probably fall more in the later category.

As with pretty much everything writing-related, reading often and widely is key to understanding tense and POV. If you read often and widely, you will in all likelihood pick up the underlying principles without even realizing you’re doing it!

Regrettably, I don’t have the space to investigate tense and POV fully. I will say, however, that mistakes with these aspects of storytelling are common among beginning writers, and are a sure sign of inexperience.

The Year of Blogging Regularly

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Candles spell out the traditional English birt...

My blog is one year old today. What started with a vague decision to work out some of my writing questions through daily posts soon crystalized into the concept of a “living notebook.” It hasn’t quite been a year of living dangerously… more like a year of living in coffee shops, drinking a lot of liquids (coffee, alcohol), putting on weight, and stressing out occasionally… but it’s been a good year. And when I graduate, I’ll be heading into a situation where I can afford to eat better and work out regularly. So I’m looking forward to that a lot.

To give myself a break, I’m going to be doing a post a week for the foreseeable future. My own general sense is that that Monday posts tend to get the most attention. Monday posts will have the added benefit of “sitting” out there on the Internet throughout the week, allowing people to wander by before they get busy on the weekend. So from now on, you can look for me every Monday around 9 a.m. At least that’s the plan.

Happy birthday to me!

mmm